BETWEEN ROMANCE AND HISTORY: GALFRIDIAN HISTORIOGRAPHY IN JEAN D'ARRAS'S MÉLUSINE

• Published in: Medium aevum Vol. 91; no. 2; pp. 254 - 275
• Main Author: Flood, Victoria
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: Oxford Society for the Study of Mediaeval Languages and Literature 01.07.2022
• Subjects: 15th century; Correspondence; Fiction; French language; Historiography; History; Literary translation; Prophecies; Prose; Traditions; Translations; United Kingdom > UK; England; France
• ISSN: 0025-8385

Jean d'Arrass late fourteenth-century French prose romance Melusine survives in the major vernaculars of Western Europe, including a close English translation produced c.1500.1 Jeans text incorporates prophecies ascribed to the fairy heroine, her mother, and her sisters concerning the fate of the house of Lusignan, whose early fortunes the romance fictionalizes, retained to varying degrees in subsequent translations.2 Prophecy is a defining component of the text, a feature of dynastic romance derived from history-writing. Melusines son Guyon, a crusader who becomes King of Armenia, bears a loose affinity to the twelfth-century King of Jerusalem, Guy of Lusignan; while Geoffroy, who murders his brother Froimont along with the monks of Maillezais, has been associated with Geoffroy, Viscount of Chatellerault, a lord of Lusignan who attacked the monastery in 1232.5 While revisionist in some of its accounts of recent history, when taken as a whole the history of Melusine is not revisionist so much as it is symbolic, drawing dynastic symbols of the house into new configurations. The fiction of real-world referentiality is a visible presence in the text, endorsed by its engagement with Galfridian prophecy as a marvellous but decidedly historiographical discourse.7 Following an account of the political and literary contexts of the text, situating Jean in relation to available Galfridian precedents, this article explores two significant components of Jeans historiographical strategy, which owe much to the Galfridian tradition: a prophetic foundation legend located in a pseudo-insular context, and the association between phantasmatic and demonic interlocutors and futurist prophecies of dynastic decline and expansion. The overtly political rationale of Melusine turns not on the family's royal French genealogy but their maternal line, traced through Bonne of Luxembourg to the fairy founder of the House of Lusignan, Melusine, the half-serpent daughter of the fairy Presine and Elinas, King of Albany (Scotland).8 The legendary genealogy the romance traces in association with Jean de Berry was remote and, as Jane Taylor has observed, the text constructs a geographical genealogy feeding off a biological one'.9 The greater part of the romance concerns the deeds of Melusine's sons, who build an empire which extends from Poitou into Central Europe and the Mediterranean.